Harold Edward Monro

Biography

Harold Edward Monro was an excellent writer and a talented entrepreneur. Monro was born March 14^th, 1879 to Edward William Monro and Edward's first cousin, Arabel Sophia. His father died at the age of 41, when Monro was just nine years old. He and his sister Mary were thereafter raised by their widowed mother, who would later remarry in 1910. Monro himself married on December 2^nd 1903, to Dorothy Elizabeth Brown, who  gave birth to their firstborn son, Nigel in 1904. Unfortunately, the marriage did not last long, and in 1908, he and Dorothy separated. Monro later met Alida klemantaski, a woman 17 years his junior, who, like himself, was passionate about poetry. Monro persuaded her to work at the Poetry Bookshop, and they married in 1920. Many scholars agree that Alida had a greater influence on Monro’s poetry than any other person.

Monro came from a long line of well-established men, his father being a civil engineer and his grandfather, Dr. Henry Munro, a surgeon. It is interesting to note that Monro’s son Nigel would follow the family medical tradition by becoming a surgeon. Monro studied at Radley College and Cambridge University, and would later publish his first collection of poetry in 1906. He enjoyed writing and editing, and for a time edited for “The Poetry Review,” a prominent periodical at the time. He would later establish the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, where he went on to publish his own work and the work of others. Monro was deeply attached to the bookshop, and for a time his bookshop was a great success. However, later in his life, Monro would find himself greatly in debt, using nearly all his money to subsidize the bookshop. On top of his financial troubles, he had a substantial drinking problem, and in March of 1932, contracted tuberculosis and died. He is remembered as a man who held no literary prejudices, who did much for the advancement of poetry in the twentieth-century.